@H.B.A Welcome to the forum!
I moved your post into the existing feature request on the same topic.
Hey, thanks Nail!
I was sure I wasn’t the only one who felt that this is an obvious feature to have, the only reason I created this account is to request this feature, but damn! Six whole years and still? Is there a reason why?
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Bitwarden should provide an email field by default. Every website requiring a login also requires an email address. Sometimes the login is the email address, but often it is not. In those cases an email is still required. It’s a pain to have to set it up manually.
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Hello @Sophocles and welcome to the community!
That’s not strictly true. A popular exception are banking websites.
@Sophocles Welcome to the forum!
I moved your post into an existing feature request on the same topic.
I stumbled over this shortcome of Bitwarden the first day I gave it a try. After digging through many blog and forum post, my resume is: Many discussions and feature requests in various matters would find a solution in further extending the standard items to cover contemporary demands. But standard items/templates seem to be a holy gral of Bitwarden, which is extremely rigid against changes.
A basic design strategy for a password manager should be to capture and save all information involved in a login procedure, not to loose anything which might be useful to have later. Not offering the email address in the standard login template is a no-go and a design flaw in a modern password manager, it’s simple like that.
It is true that in the first years of online services in the 1990s (I experienced it) the user name or a customer number has some importance, but those days are gone. Since then the email address has established as unique identifyer.
The simple solution would be to add an email field to the standard login item and let it empty if a website does not ask for an email to register, which is extremely rare. For autofill the email or the username is offered, whatever is asked.
While other password managers have dedicated templates for online shops, forums, banks, etc. to meet the different requirements, Bitwarden wants to stay with one universal template for all logins. But isn’t it basic logic, that an universal template must offer the union of all fields, and not the least common multiple? To complement a minimal structure with unstructured custom fields on demand, for information of similar type, as the first email address, is an unfavourable appoach in information management (and relational databases).
The vast majority of login cases are that of millions of online shops, where it is standard to fill just the email address besides the password, while a user name is not involved at all. For this reason the huge majority of the BW global data base entries will have the username field populated with email addresses already, which makes it an universal field in fact. This established base could co-exist with an extended template, without problem, no point against progression.
The next step in a registration progress of an online shop (the majority of all login cases) would be to autofill with an identity item for shopping with a real name and street address for delivery service for physical goods. Any email address of an identity item would not interfere with the login, because it is not asked again in the registration process.
So the feature request from my side is: Please add an email field to the login item template!